


What It Means To Feel: The Crimson Arrow and The White

by Tigerine (sealink)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Amputation, Body Dysphoria, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Psychological Trauma, Self-Harm, Suicide Attempt, Triggers
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-10
Updated: 2013-10-21
Packaged: 2017-12-26 05:31:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 13,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/962167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sealink/pseuds/Tigerine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rated for later chapters. Taking place in the same mental health facility as the Levi/Eren fic "What it Means To Feel", this fanfic-fanfic follows the admission and treatment of Marco Bott and his relationship with roommate Jean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Random Passerby

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Opulence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opulence/gifts).
  * Inspired by [What it Means to Feel](https://archiveofourown.org/works/910041) by [Opulence](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Opulence/pseuds/Opulence). 



“So, does this have anything to do with that night?”

“Wow, you are seriously rude. I have been here for literally all of two hours and you start in with that?”

I _was_ tired. The day had been long, longer than I’d really anticipated. Spending a few days at home hadn’t helped. My parents couldn’t really cope with it. We didn’t have any ramps or anything that could accommodate the wheelchair. I was kind of relieved when they suggested the ‘inpatient mental health facility’. Being a burden to them, on top of what I’d already done… I didn’t think I could handle it.

Jean shrugged. “Everyone else in here is really boring and I haven’t had a roomie for a few days.”

“I don’t really feel like talking about it. I’m tired and I want to go to sleep. We can talk in the morning.”

“I’m really kind of surprised they’d stick you in here like that,” he wondered out loud.

“Good _night_ , Jean.”

The dreams were the same each time. Darkness and confusion. Pain. Headlights and a sense of cold release. Sometimes he showed up near the end. Most times, he didn’t.

The next morning, I woke with a sense of unease. The room was really, really quiet. Early dawn crept through the barred institutional window in the corner, providing just enough light to make out my roommate. I propped myself up on one elbow, craning over to look at Jean. His shock of dirty blond hair stuck out at weird angles, and his lips were slightly parted. His breathing was so deep and even that it didn’t look like he was breathing at all. He’s actually pretty cute.

He probably doesn’t need someone like me around him, though. Homosexual amputees were kind of a niche market. I tried, but couldn’t really get back to sleep. I watched the walls light up with the morning, first blue and then gold with the sunrise. I could see the shadows of nurses pass our door out in the hall.

The silence of the room made it even more obvious when Jean began dreaming; it wasn’t until he began moaning that I thought something might be wrong. I sat up and lunged out of the bed, hopping on one foot and landing heavily on his bed next to him. His face was screwed up in a grimace.

“Jean. Jean, wake up.” I shook him gently with my left hand. “Jean. You’re having a nightmare.” He groaned again and I took his hand in mine, rubbing my thumb over his knuckles. He couldn’t seem to move, couldn’t seem to wake up.  

“Jean. Jean, you’re okay. I’ve got you, okay? It’s okay.”

His eyes snapped open and he gasped for air. “Oh God,” he mumbled. “Oh fuck.”

“It’s okay, it was just a bad dream.”

“Oh God,” he said again, clapping his hand over his eyes and swallowing. “You. You were there. Oh my God, Marco,” he said, and sat up, hugging me. “Thank God you’re okay.”

The dream… was about me? I suppose I was kind of used to the dreams. They didn’t really scare me. In some ways, they were happy, peaceful dreams for me. They heralded the end of a long period of suffering.

“Marco. Marco, the bus—“

“It’s okay, I’m still here. I’m okay,” I said, rubbing his back.

“Like hell you are.” He buried his face in my neck, shuddering. “Marco, I thought—I thought it got you, all of you.”

I should have known that he would have different memories of that night. That where I found cold comfort in the way my arm was shattered and bent, he was beside himself.  He’d just been an innocent bystander, absentmindedly browsing his smartphone next to me. He couldn’t have possibly known what I was going to do. I had a lot of mixed feelings about that, to be honest. 

“No, Jean, I’m here. I’m okay.”

He let out one shivering sob and then squeezed me even tighter. “I’m… I’m so glad. I’m so glad, Marco.”

I let him hold me. It was the least I could do after just simply existing had given him nightmares. He had probably been going about his life, having a normal night before I’d stepped off a curb and ruined it a month ago.

“So I guess you can’t go back to sleep?”

“Uh-uh,” Jean grunted. “I don’t want to. We’ll need to be getting up soon anyway.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“You already know what it was about.”

Yeah, I knew what it was about.  “To answer your question from last night, Jean, yeah, I’m in here because of the bus.” 

“It’s been a month.”

“I’ve been in the hospital. “ I resisted the urge to kiss his temple and smell his hair. A hug didn’t mean anything. “I even went home for a few days.”  Jean was quiet, and he finally pulled away, leaning against the wall. His eyes looked tired even though he had just woken up. I pushed myself further into his bed, leaning against the wall next to him.

“Your… your parents, how’d they do with it?”

I sighed. “Not… great. They are pretty hurt that I didn’t come to them, I think.”

“Was it their idea to stick you in here?”

“Yes, but I think that’s for the best for everyone.” I looked down at my right arm stump, cut just above the elbow, and my right leg, amputated at the knee. Mom and Dad had had such big dreams for me. Basketball or track scholarships evaporated overnight, our weekend hikes in national parks gone. I couldn’t bring myself to look at Jean.  “My parents were pretty… it hit them pretty hard.”

“Marco, that is the worst—the _worst_ —attempt at making a pun I have ever heard in my life.”

“I didn’t injure my sense of humor, I guess.”

“Thank God for that.” He threaded his hand through his hair, rubbing his face.

I was avoiding the obvious question. He hadn’t volunteered any information about it last night, choosing instead to roll my wheelchair around the ward, showing me where things were and introducing me. But it hung in the air between us, unspoken. Rather than break the silence, I simply opted for a smile. “I didn’t really get a chance to thank you before.”

Jean turned to look at me, his hazel eyes softening. “It… it wasn’t a big deal, really.” He drew his knees up to his chest, folding his arms over them. “Anyone else would have done the same thing.”

“I don’t know about that.”  

“Aw, c’mon, Marco. Be serious. It’s not like I could watch someone get hit by a bus and just leave them there,” he protested.

He didn’t know how much I remembered.

“We need to head in for breakfast.” Jean scooted off the edge of the bed and rolled my wheelchair so that I could slide into the seat, flopping the left footrest down.

“Is the breakfast any good here?”

“Compared to what? Starvation?”

“Compared to anything.”

“It’ll make a turd.”

“Jean, that’s disgusting.” Jean opened the door to our room with one hand and then propped it open with his foot while he rolled me out.

“I blame Levi. Only time that guy ever says anything is to make some kind of juvenile poop joke.”

“Levi... which one was he again?” I tried to ask over my shoulder, but we were soon joined by the genuine article, a short, sour man wearing a permanent scowl.

“Here he is,” Jean said, a little loudly. “Levi, this is Marco. Marco, Levi.”

 “Hi, Levi,” I said, offering him my hand. “Nice to meet you.”

Levi looked at me as if I was something the cat had dragged in.  “You’ve got to be fucking joking.”

“Hey, not everyone is as fucked up as you are. Some people don’t mind having friends.” Jean came to my defense. I hadn’t even asked him to.

“No, Jean, it’s okay.”  I turned in the wheelchair to look at him as Levi drifted off towards a cafeteria table. “Really, it’s fine.”

“That guy,” Jean fumed. “He’s always such a dick.”

“Maybe he has his reasons.”

“Maybe,” Jean grumbled.

After breakfast, we sat vacantly in front of the television. It was good to see something kind of normal, even if that was just daytime television. Jean parked me next to the couch and then sat so he was next to me. “All these shows suck,” he complained.

“I like watching the cooking segments,” I volunteered.

“Yeah, but it’s always food that you can’t get in here,” Jean responded. “I don’t think the cafeteria staff could spell ‘Asiago’, much less use it in a recipe.”

“The cheesy jokes kind of write themselves.”

“Marco, is this going to be a regular thing with you?” Jean’s face was split in a wry grin. “I mean… do they always have to be so _bad_?”

I couldn’t help smiling. “Do you know why bad jokes are actually good jokes, Jean?”

“They’re… not?”

“But you smiled, didn’t you?”  I had him there, and I loved the way he smiled. I think… I think I might actually fall for this guy, really fall for him.

“Okay, so _why_ are bad jokes actually good jokes.”

“When people tell a joke, sometimes it’s off-color. Sexist or racist, right? The thing with bad jokes is that everyone agrees the joke is bad. No one judges the joke-teller and thinks, ‘Oh, that guy’s a racist’. They think ‘That’s a really bad joke’, but it doesn’t become a judgment of that person. People laugh because they’re laughing at how bad the joke is, not at how unfair the world is.”

“…Marco?”

“Yes, Jean?”

“That’s still no excuse for such a bad sense of humor.” The corners of his mouth quirked into a playful grin. “But I guess I can see what you’re getting at.”

We turned back to watch the cooking segment, which had become some kind of induction into the cult of balsamic vinegar and later a treatise on the evils of refined sugar.

“Hey, Marco?”

“Hmm?”

“Do they hurt?”

Ah. That question. “That’s… a sensitive topic, Jean.”

His face was instantly apologetic. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t me—“ he stopped mid-sentence. My smile had given me away.

“God _dammit_ , Marco.”  He didn’t look nearly as angry as he wanted to pretend he was.

“To answer your question, it kind of depends on what you mean by hurting.” I didn’t think I could tell him out here. It wasn’t something that I really wanted to share with everyone.  But Jean… Jean had earned the right to know by virtue of being the one to save my life in the street a month ago. “Can I talk to you more about it later?”

“Sure,” Jean said amiably. “It’ll be nice to have someone to talk to for a change.”

They called us in for group a few minutes later, just as the segment on rheumatoid arthritis started really getting good. Jean rolled me through the halls to the group room, and he locked my chair in place and sat next to me. All the other chairs slowly filled; I recognized Levi, but the other faces were unfamiliar to me.

Group began without much fanfare. The group leader was a boisterous brunette; the name on her ID badge (which had the same smile she seemingly wore all the time) said ‘Hanji’. “Good morning, everyone,” she said brightly.

Levi looked as if he wanted to fade away into nothingness. Jean was trying his best to look attentive, but he was easy to read: he’d rather not be here. The other ones looked uncertainly around the room, dividing their attention between the novelty of a double amputee and the boundless entertainment of figuring out how far into a chair Levi could sink without tipping it backwards.

“Today in group we’ll be talking about consequences. Now, I see we have a new face with us, so if you’ll introduce yourself?”

“I’m Marco,” I said, looking around the room. “I’m glad to meet everyone.”

Hanji nodded eagerly, “Go on, tell us a bit about yourself.”

This was the worst part. How much could I say without being the strange one? I’m in a mental hospital, but really, this wasn’t too much of a big deal, right?  “I just got here yesterday, so I don’t know everyone’s faces yet, but I have already made a good friend out of Jean and I hope I can get to know the rest of you soon.”

Hanji nodded, satisfied. Good. The rest of it was… difficult to relate to people.

“So today, we’ll be talking about consequences.” Hanji looked at each of us in turn. “What do I mean when I say consequences?”

“You mean when we do things and experience the fall-out from it, “piped up a petite blonde.

“Well, you’re partially right, but this makes consequences sound bad. I guess what I really mean to talk about is outcomes. We don’t necessarily know what the outcome will be when we make our decisions. But this doesn’t mean we can stop making decisions.” Hanji looked around the circle, pinioning each of us with her intent gaze.  “We simply have to make the best decisions we can at the time. That’s all we can do, and that’s okay. Sometimes that means that things don’t go the way we wanted them to. But we still have to live with the consequences.”

Consequences. I felt like every eye in the room, even Levi’s, flicked to my arms and legs, every one of them asking wordlessly what they were the consequences for.

I barely had any time with Jean after group before my social worker, a Mr. Schultz, came for my intake evaluation.  The questions were the same as they’d been when I checked in with the psychiatrist, but the person was different.

“I already told Dr. Langner all this stuff yesterday,” I said, but he simply smiled patiently at me.

“I know it’s troublesome, but I think we can work together better if you tell me about yourself.”

“Isn’t it all there in the file?”

“Marco, we are going to be working together for a while. Please try to work with me on this, okay?”

I sighed. It couldn’t be helped. Talk about consequences. Fine. The sooner we get this done, the sooner I can get back to Jean.

“Okay, what do you want to know?”

“Why don’t we start with you telling me about why you’re here? You checked yourself in, didn’t you?”

“My parents did.”

“Okay,” he said expectantly.

“It was after… my accident. We don’t really have any way to deal with this at home.”

“What do you mean by ‘this’?”

“This.” I gestured at my wheelchair, at my leg, my arm.

“But rehabilitation would have helped with that, right?”

I felt defeated already. I didn’t want to talk about this to a complete stranger, least of all one who looked so intent on cracking me open and figuring out why I tried to off myself with a bus. “If this is going to really work, you need to give me some time to talk. It may look like I’m not speaking to you, but I’m really just thinking about the best way to say things, okay?”

“I think that’s great that you can tell me that.” He scribbled on a yellow legal pad and then looked back at me. “I’ll try to live up to your expectations.” His face was open and warm. Expectations. What expectations could I possibly have of a social worker in a psych ward?

“To get back to your question, I don’t mean just losing my limbs.” I looked down at my lap. “I meant the suicide attempt. Mom and Dad don’t really know how to talk to me about it.”

“Have you talked to anyone about it?”

“Not… really.”

“Would you like to talk to me about it?”

“You’re going to ask me anyway, so I might as well.” Taking a deep breath, I launched into the official version of the events of that night. It was cool and misty and I’d been feeling really depressed so I decided to step out in front of a bus.

“But you survived.”

“Yes, there was someone there who helped me. He rode with me in the ambulance to the hospital.”

“Did you know him?”

No, I didn’t know him then. I barely knew him now. He’d visited my bedside in the hospital the first few days, but as the extent of my injuries became clear, he disappeared, stopped coming. I couldn’t shake the feeling that my suicide attempt was what landed him in here, sharing a room with me in the psych ward. “No. No, he was just a random passerby.”


	2. Long Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marco's first day isn't as smooth as he'd hoped it would be, but maybe talking to Jean will help him sort through things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the second chapter of this paean to Opulence. I am so lucky to be able to spend time chitchatting and fangirling with her. 
> 
> My tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> Tracked tag: #fic: what it means to feel

“So how’d your intake go?” We hadn’t really had a chance to talk much until now, the quiet time after dinner. An impromptu game of Pictionary had broken out between lunch and dinner, limiting the chance for conversation. I got the sense that it was mostly for my benefit, as Jean had walked around bullying everyone into participating. He seemed to care about how I felt, and maybe my disappointment with the social worker had been more apparent than I realized.

 “I really… really don’t like having my head shrunk.”

“Yeah,” Jean looked down at the table. “It doesn’t seem like it helps sometimes.”

Well, in my case, I’d gotten most of what I wanted already.  It had happened in kind of a roundabout and profoundly painful way, but most of it had worked out according to plan. The plan I hadn’t shared with anyone, not even now.

“You want some coffee?” Jean stood up, looking uncomfortable. “It’s decaf, so it won’t keep you up late.”

“Sure.”

“How do you take it?”

“Black.”

Jean smiled a little. “Really?” He leaned on the table and looked directly into my eyes, one eyebrow lifting and his lips curling in a grin. “ _Really?_ ”

I looked away from him, feeling heat rise in my cheeks. He was too cute for his own good. “… fine, one sugar.”

“I thought so.”  Jean leaned back. “You don’t have to pretend you like things you don’t, okay? I don’t mind.”

“I just… don’t want to be any trouble.”

“It’s no trouble, Marco.” 

The coffee was bad. Really bad. Jean had dumped creamer and sugar into his and I began to wish I had done the same. I looked deep into the paper cup, swirling the coffee around. I just hadn’t wanted to bother him.

 I knew that this kind of thinking was what had gotten me into this whole mess. Not wanting to tell anyone how I felt, not wanting to tell anyone about the way I looked at myself and hated everything I saw. People don’t really get it when you tell them that you want to cut off parts of yourself.  You look like one whole being to them; they can’t really get that this part of you is not part of you.

So the depression comes and then the thoughts of ending it all. No one can see how much you’re hurting. No one can understand how much you’d like to just lay down and die somewhere so you can get away from the feel of something alien on your body.  Talking about it with someone who doesn’t understand just makes it worse. I’d just really rather not bother anyone else with it.

“You look like you’re thinking about some pretty heavy stuff.”

I looked up at Jean and his face changed. 

“Jean…” My vision started to tremble. I could go from zero to blubbering in 5 seconds and I really didn’t want to turn into a crybaby out here in the common room.

“Hey, hey, what’s going on?” He scooted closer, looking me in the eyes. His voice was soft, concerned. “Are you okay? Do you need a nurse?”

God, not another nurse. Anything but that. “No, let’s just…let’s go back to the room.”

He hesitated for just a second and then moved back behind my chair, flipping the brake up and walking me past the nurse’s station. I covered my face with my hand and tried to get a hold of myself. It just came up so suddenly, before I even knew what was happening. I blinked and the tears started rolling down my cheeks.

We paused in front of our door, while he opened it. I chanced looking up and caught Levi looking at me. Jean glared at Levi as he took the handles behind my back. “What the fuck are you looking at, Levi?”

“Nothing,” Levi replied, looking at Jean and then back at me. His eyes were cold and distant. “Nothing at all.”

Jean flipped him off as he rolled me into the room. The door closed behind us with a soft click. It was blessedly dark, the twilight outside painting the room a gloomy blue. I sucked inand let out a shuddery breath. Got to get myself under control.

“Marco, I don’t know, are you sure you don’t need a nurse?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll be okay.” I think. I hope.

“Is there anything I can do?” I heard him come around and then he was kneeling in front of me. He took my hand in his and I prayed like crazy for a second that he would press his lips to my knuckles.

“Just… don’t leave me alone. Tell me about something, anything.” I rubbed my face on my sleeve.

“Anything, huh?”  Jean sat down heavily on the bed. “Okay, give me a second.”

I flipped up the foot rest and hopped onto the bed next to him. “Tell me about your family.”

“Huh?”

My heart gave a strange sideways beat—he sounded adorable when he was surprised.

“Your family.”

And then his face changed. He looked more wounded, more like he’d remembered something he’d just as soon as forgotten. It was the same look my mother gave me when she helped me in and out of the bathtub after the amputations, the downcast eyes that betrayed the way we didn’t want to look at reality.

“…. I’d better not,” he said finally. I tried to look at his face, but he turned away. “Anything else you want to hear about?”

“You decide, Jean.”

“I don’t want to… trigger you, Marco.” Jean turned back to face me, a resigned look on his face. “I didn’t even know that was a fucking word before I got in here, but…” His eyes fell to my right arm. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

The way he said ‘trigger’ made my gorge rise. Everything suddenly fit together. His nightmare about my suicide attempt. He didn’t know what a trigger was until he got here.

“Jean, are you in here because of me?” He avoided looking me in the face and I grabbed his hand, squeezing it. “Is that why you stopped coming to see me?”

He flinched and then looked toward the darkening window.

I pressed my lips together, willing the bile in my throat to go back down. “I didn’t know. I thought you just thought your Good Samaritan duties were over and you went on with your life.”

“Yeah, well… I didn’t know that it was going to happen.”  Jean scrunched his toes up in the blankets. “I didn’t think that helping anyone would cause me to have a mental breakdown, but here I am.”

“Jean, I’m… I’m so sorry, I didn’t…”

“You know, Marco, I don’t really feel like talking about this right now.” He gave my hand a squeeze and then picked it up and put it back on my lap. “I’ve got to get some air. I’ll be back in a minute.”

He flicked on the lights as he left; the dark window became a hole in the brightness of the institutional walls. I lay down on his bed, suddenly tired of sitting up, suddenly tired of everything. Sleep seemed like the best option, just sinking away into the warm grey of the polyester blankets, smelling the mixture of phosphate detergent and Jean. It made my chest clench. I just had to make it until he came back. I just had to make it that long and I’d be okay.

I watched the hole in the wall grow darker, until I couldn’t even see the tree outside anymore. I listened to the scratch of my eyelashes against the bed, to the creak of my own body in my ears, to the sound of my breath. It slowed as I stared at the window and imagined the faint night breeze moving through the branches. I looked at my hand, watched it being still, as one studies a cricket in one of those little plastic bug boxes. The skin was the same color as mine, having that mottled yellow-pink look that skin gets in the cold. It had long, tapered fingers and the fingernails were short and clean. Will it move? Will it jump?

What would it do if I touched it? Would it be soft? Warm? Would it hold on to me?  I willed it to move, watching to see if it was alive. But it stayed still, curled up like a dead spider. A bug in a box.

The door opening was like the report of a gun. “Sorry. I just needed a second.”

I sat bolt upright, broken out of my dissociation. God, he’d caught me lying on his bed like some kind of weirdo. “I… Me too.”

“You can lie back down if you want.” Jean shoved his hands in the pockets of his sweatpants. “I don’t mind.”

I looked at him and then at the bed and then slowly slumped over on his pillow. He watched me and then sat in my wheelchair, scooting it up next to me and taking that hand—my hand—and squeezing it again.

“I… I held it like this when you were in the ambulance,” he said thickly. “I didn’t know who you were or even what had really happened, but, I just couldn’t leave you alone.”  He squeezed my hand again. “You needed someone.”

I watched his face, blinking slowly. I remembered this. I remembered the way he’d looked at me, panic and concern knitting his brow together, the blood on his hands as he closed them around mine. The crinkle of the shock blanket, the whine of machinery, the distant scream of the sirens, they were all background noise to the way he seemed to dote on every blink of my eyes.

“Even after my parents arrived, I knew you were there,” I said weakly. “I could hear your voice.” I saw him swallow and blink rapidly.  

I had drifted in and out of consciousness, my tongue thick and dry in my mouth, first with fentanyl, and then with anesthesia, but Jean was always there. He volunteered to watch me when my parents went home to shower. He watched me when they ran down to the cafeteria.  Even when I drowsed, he was there, and my left hand in his had been soothing.

“I didn’t know they were going to… that you had to have… your arm and leg taken,” Jean said, dropping his head. “I came by and they said you were recovering from surgery and I’d thought everything was going to be okay, and I just…” He sounded on the verge of breaking down into tears.

I moved before I realized it, pressing my lips to the back of his hand. “Jean, Jean, I’m so sorry. You didn’t deserve any of this. If I could have, I would have done so much differently. I would have waited for the next bus—“

“You idiot!” His face changed in a flash, from tearful to wroth. “Are you fucking with me right now? Are you seriously suggesting that you waiting for the next bus would have been better?” He gripped my hand until I winced. “I saved your fucking life and you think it would have been better if I hadn’t??”

“Jean, I can explain—“

“Really?? You think you can explain that away? Be my guest, Marco.” He sat back, giving me a challenging nod and folding his arms across his chest. “Be my fucking guest.”

I sat up, pushing my hand through my hair. He had a right to know. I owed my life to him as much as to the paramedics, as much as to the surgeons. What was more, I wanted him to know. I wanted him to understand me.

“I don’t know how to say this, but I’ll try my best. It…. I haven’t told anyone about this in a long time.” I looked down at my right arm. “This… This part of me that’s been removed… didn’t really feel like part of me at all.” I touched the knitted sock that covered the end. “It’s like, I would look down at my hand and it was not my hand. Same thing with my leg.” I looked at Jean, finding that his angry expression had already softened.

“It’s not like it moves on its own, you know. It’s connected to me, but it’s not part of me. Explaining that to anyone seemed stupid. How do you explain to someone that your hand isn’t yours? People think you’re absolutely nuts.” I tucked my left leg back into my lap, picking bits of fuzz off the textured footie sock on my left foot.

“How did this start?”

“I think it started when my cousin was medically discharged from the Army. Near as I can figure out, anyway.”

“Did your cousin..?” Jean trailed off.

“Yeah, his leg.” I looked down at mine. “It sounds even dumber to say it out loud, like I looked at someone and thought that my life would be better as an amputee. I had some sports scholarships coming my way. I had a lot of things that seemed to be going right, but I also hated myself.”

I took a deep breath, my eyes fixed on the places my hand and feet had been. “I hated myself so much. It’s really difficult to feel these things all the time. To wake up and feel like, ‘oh God, another day like this. Another day with this… thing on me.’”

Jean was watching me talk, and he unfolded his arms, resting his elbows on his knees and washing his hands together.

Tears started welling up in my eyes but I blinked them back and tried to harden my voice. Crying in front of Jean felt terrible. He’d seen so much of my downfall, of my self-destruction, and he hadn’t even had the chance to know me before that. He stretched over to the short dresser and grabbed a box of tissues, offering me one. I grabbed one and dabbed at my eyes, sniffing loudly and plunging ahead.

 “I started withdrawing from my family, from my classes. My boyfriend broke up with me. I spent all my time on the internet or watching movies. I didn’t want to think about the body I was in. Moving was out of the question, because it meant I had to use the body I hated. As long as I didn’t move, I could pretend that I didn’t have a problem.”  Ugh, crying was so disgusting.

 “I didn’t want to acknowledge that I had to eat or sleep or anything. Taking care of this body didn’t feel like it was my problem, because it wasn’t mine. I felt like I wanted to cut all of it off. I wanted to just be rid of it.”

I smiled wanly. “So, the bus… it was kind of a means to an end. If I lived, maybe there would be enough damage to cut them off. If I died, I wouldn’t have to look at them anymore.” I looked down. “When I stepped off the curb, I didn’t really care what happened one way or the other. I just wanted it to be over.”

“You’re not the only one who suffers like that, you know.” His voice was so quiet.

“I know.”

Jean stood and looked down at me. I don’t know what he saw when he looked down at me. We stared at each other for what seemed like ages, until he finally sighed and bent down, wrapping his arms around me in a close hug, settling his chin over my left shoulder. “I’m really, really glad you didn’t die, Marco.”

He held me tightly, smelling of cedar and vetiver, a warm, green scent that made me close my eyes. He turned his head and I felt heat of his breath in my hair for a moment before he broke the embrace. His face looked unguarded, at ease, and maybe a bit relieved.

“Thanks for telling me. I know it wasn’t easy for you.”

Easy? It’d had been the hardest thing I’d done since making the decision to try to kill myself with mass transit.

Jean picked up my hand and squeezed it. “If you ever have thoughts like that again, tell me. Mostly because I am not in any position to pull you out from under a bus again,” he said with a small smile, “But also because I don’t want you to think you don’t have a friend in this. I’ll do anything; just say the word, okay?”

I nodded slowly. I didn’t know it then, but this was probably the moment I fell head over heels for him.


	3. Mask of Myself

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After a rough night, an art therapy session has Marco wondering just how much he really knows about Jean.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com  
> Tracked tag: #fic: what it means to feel, #wimtf, #tigerine
> 
> Thanks to Opulence for letting me play in her world and beta-reading this chapter <3

The worst part of knowing that you are dreaming in a dream like this is being unable to wake up. No one really knows why we dream, although there are a lot of theories. Some researchers think that dreams have meaning, and that examining them can open pathways for self-discovery.  Other researchers think that dreams are where we analyze information from each day and either clear out the “disk space” of the brain or create long-term memories. Still others think that dreaming serves as a kind of “trial run” for real life, so that we can experience stressful situations and try to adapt responses without actually being in danger.

The reality is that, whatever its purpose, your brain takes you for a ride while you’re asleep. If you’re unlucky enough to have dreams that are both terrifyingly vivid and lucid, all you can do is hold on and wait for your brain to be done with you.

The asphalt was still warm; I could smell the pavement, mingling with the stink of exhaust. The heat seeped through my clothes. There was pain in my side, in my leg, everywhere.  I turned to see my elbow poking out of my skin, and the realization of the red-white of the bones showing through was like fire that spread from my extremities into my chest. It burned across my pectoral muscle with a feeling like being ripped apart. The fire was followed by a wave of cold and numbness sweeping up my arm and then into my back.

Seeing the injury had made me much more aware of how bad this actually was, and worse, I didn’t know the condition of my leg. I couldn’t seem to get my head to lift to look at it. Everything was leaden. I hadn’t been successful in my attempt, at least, not yet. Somehow, there was a strange sense of relief. I felt so much better that I had actually done something about this, that I had taken action. I closed my eyes and hoped that everything would be over soon.

Now there were hands under my armpits, the scrape of gravel under my body, a sensation of motion, and renewed pain in my arm. He was here. I knew the next words.  I had lived this over so many times before.

“YOU, CALL 911!”

His face was the same every time. His hazel eyes frantic, pupils blown wide open. I heard the clink and snap of a belt being removed, and he tied it around my right bicep, cinching it tight. He took off his shirt, twisting it into a long rope and slid it around my thigh, tying it tight.

“Don’t move, okay? Don’t move.”

Then his knees were on either side of my head, pressing into my ears.  He was breathing hard, panting, and now that my neck was stabilized between his thighs, I could really see him shaking. I opened my mouth but no sound came out.  He rubbed his face with his wrists.  I heard him suck in air between his teeth, fingers pinched at the bridge of his nose and then exhaled through his mouth. Another breath, in through his nose and then he blew it out shakily.

I tried to say his name, but my voice never came. It was lost in the dream.

When I woke, I was freezing. I had gathered up my covers into a wad and curled my legs and arm around it, hugging them. It was still dark outside. The dream continued to dance in front of my eyes, mingled with my memories of the event.

In truth, I spent most of the moments after the bus hit me in a daze. Fragments of the event stayed with me: the sight of my own bones, the heat of the road at night, the feeling of being dragged, the pressure of the tourniquet on my arm, the distant sound of the sirens. But other parts of it simply vanished in the mists of my memory. I didn’t remember Jean crying over me, or the faces of any of the paramedics.  The ride there was a blur, between being lost in the pain drugs and urged to stay awake until they were sure I didn’t have a concussion.  Though the rest became cloudy, one image stayed with me: I remembered the feel of Jean’s hands, both of them, clasped around my one. 

Jean woke in the grey light of dawn before the nurses came in to rouse us: I heard his sudden intake of breath as he reached consciousness.

“Jean?”

“Oh, God, Marco. Are you already awake?”

“Yeah.”

He shifted in bed, sitting up and leaning on one elbow. “How’d you sleep?”

I had no idea how long I’d been awake, staring off into the distance and drifting among the memories of my suicide attempt. Half an hour? Longer? The dream had so thoroughly enclosed me that I had no idea what time it was or how much time had passed. I closed my eyes in the darkness, sighing softly. Still tired, but not sleepy.  I guess a night’s broken sleep was better than no sleep at all, but…

“Not great, but not bad.”

Better not to tell him how my dreams had actually gone.

“Are you ready for breakfast?”

“Yes,” I said, without thinking. I almost sounded too eager. I was eager to escape the room and the parts of my dream that still lurked in the dark corners of the room.

Breakfast was largely uneventful; the same cardboard toast and tasteless eggs that there always were. There was a new face this morning, a blond young man, about my age, named Armin. His smile was sad and gentle, but he didn’t talk much. He was quiet, but I felt like, given the chance, we might become good friends.

After breakfast, we all filed into the group room to find tables with paint and glue set up, along with other craft paraphernalia.

“Fucking art therapy,” I heard Levi mumble behind me as he came in and tried to be as invisible as possible. 

Jean sat next to me at the table, an uncomfortable look on his face.

“Are you okay?”

“Hmm?”

“You look like you swallowed a goat.”

“Oh,” he said, with an uneasy chuckle. “I just… don’t care much for this art therapy crap. Doesn’t really do any good, I think.”

I looked at the small Styrofoam cups of water, the brushes neatly laid out, the markers in a bowl and child-proof scissors near a few spools of ribbon and a stack of tired magazines. “It doesn’t look that bad,” I ventured.

“At least it doesn’t look like it’s finger painting this time, thank God,” Levi grumbled from across the table. “Always ends up being a huge fucking mess.”

Hanji entered the room carrying a box. “Good morning, everyone,” she said brightly.  A general groan of acknowledgement went up from the group, but I was more curious about what exactly was in the box.

“As you may have guessed, we’ll be doing art therapy today in lieu of our usual group session,” she said, setting the box down on the table and pulling up a chair.

“Today, we are going to talk about masks.  We all wear masks in our day-to-day lives, especially when we are dealing with new situations or difficult people.  Masks can hide how we are really feeling when showing our true feelings would cause problems for us. We also put on masks to try and ‘pass’ in situations that we otherwise might not, like when we are introduced to a new peer group that we want to become a part of.”

 “So today,” Hanji continued, opening the box, “We are going to make a mask. This mask can be whatever you want it to be. It can be a mask that you use to talk to people, a mask that you use to protect yourself, anything.”  She passed out white plastic masks, with holes on either side for an elastic strap, but those had been removed.  “If you want to make your mask more of a representation of yourself, that’s fine too. This is your mask; you decide what you want to do with it.”

“You can use whatever you see here. We have markers, paint pens, various craft supplies like pompoms,” she held up a lime green bit of fluff, “pipe cleaners, fabric—you decorate your mask the way you want to. After about an hour and a half, we’ll discuss them.”

There was a moment of stillness as everyone contemplated their blank masks, and then slowly began reaching for markers and glue.

“This is stupid.”

I turned to look at Jean, who had shoved his mask away. I was about to ask him why he thought it was stupid when Hanji crouched next to my wheelchair. “Is this something you’re comfortable doing, Marco?”

“I’m left-handed, so I should still be able to do something.”

“You don’t have to if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t want to do it, Hanji,” Jean piped up.

“Be a good sport, Jean.” Hanji smiled brightly at him. “Explore your creative side!”

Jean made a disgusted face as Hanji walked away. “I don’t have a creative side,” he said sulkily.

I looked back at the mask again. What should I even put on this mask? Should I have a plan when I start this? I didn’t think Hanji would care. After all, the point of art therapy was to… have therapy… through art, I guessed. What did I want to have therapy about? What was my problem? What did I need to fix?

I leaned forward, grabbing a black Sharpie out of a cup full of different colored markers. I scooted the mask against my right arm to hold it in place and carefully used the marker to draw a line down the middle of the mask. 

“Are you taking this seriously?”

I turned to look at Jean, who gave me a peevish look.  “Yes. I need to try to get better.”

His face changed, became less irritated and more serious. I turned back to the mask, but I noticed him reaching for markers not long after that.

It was really nice to kind of zone out and color something. I wasn’t being ‘productive’ and that was okay; being taken out of everything stressful so you could get your life back together was kind of the whole point of being here. I scribbled with the black Sharpie over the left side of the mask, covering it as thickly with color as I could. I drew things in the black parts: eyeballs that stared at me, or wheels of a bus, or the shape of a tear or a jagged bolt of lightning. And each time I drew something, I methodically covered it over with more pen strokes. Before I’d realized it, I had covered half the mask with smelly black ink. Now what?

The white half of the mask didn’t look right against the black half. It was too empty.  I looked up and began reaching for a few of the more colorful pastel markers. Slowly, I filled in the white space with small pictures of hearts, swirls, cartoony trees, four-pointed stars and rainbows. The rainbows would have probably gone in the black five years ago, but I’d come to terms with that part of me long before I’d wanted to cut off anything else.

“Okay, we’re coming up on time to stop. Five minutes,” Hanji said.  Next to me, Jean made a frustrated noise, grabbing more markers and scratching away at his mask with them.  He finished before Hanji called time.

“Okay, now let’s come over here,” she said, gesturing to the circle of chairs that was usually set up for group. “And we’ll start talking about our masks.”

Jean wheeled me over before stepping back and grabbing his mask.  He had a black look on his face and threw himself into the chair next to me. It seemed to me like he was really over-reacting to a simple art assignment. 

“Okay, let’s begin with you, Armin?”

The young blond blushed immediately. He clearly didn’t think he’d be the first one called on.

“I made this,” he said, holding up a mask which had been bisected much like mine was, but the line was drawn through the eyes. Above the line was gold, below the line, blue and then black. He had carefully glued on sparkly beads and multicolored pom-poms in the bluer parts of the mask, but the black parts were unadorned.

“That’s really wonderful, Armin,” Hanji beamed. “What would you like to tell us about it?”

“Well, the gold is supposed to be the sky, and the blue is the ocean…”

“So instead of having the sky be blue, you chose to make it gold. Does the gold symbolize anything?”

“Well…” He blushed again before stammering out, “I thought that… the gates of heaven were gold, so that gold would be… appropriate.”

Hanji smiled again. “That’s a wonderful thought, Armin. Really.”

“T-thank you.”

“Why have you drawn the ocean?”

“Well, I’ve always wanted to see the ocean,” he said, and I could hear the yearning in his voice.

“Is there a reason you’ve drawn it the way you have?”

“Ma’am?”

“You’ve drawn it so that the ocean comes up to your eyes. Is there a reason for that?”

Armin fell quiet, looking at the mask.

“Do you feel like the ocean comes up to your eyes, Armin?” Hanji’s tone had changed a little. Instead of asking the questions, she was leading him to a conclusion. I kind of admired her for being able to see immediately where Armin needed to go.

“I guess so. “ Armin looked at his mask again and began talking. “I think there’s a lot of reasons why I put it there. I wanted to literally put my eyes on the ocean, so that’s one. I also wanted to … kind of say that I think I’m deeper than some people give me credit for. That’s why this part down here is black.”

“I noticed that you put some glittery things in some parts of the ocean but not in others.”

“Yeah,” Armin replied. “It’s supposed to be fish and coral, like a tropical reef.”

“But you didn’t put anything in the deeper parts of the ocean.”

“No,” he replied, and then looked at his work, smoothing his thumb along the molded plastic lips. “I guess.. . I didn’t think that there was anything that anyone wanted to see down there. Maybe I didn’t even want to see it.”

Hanji smiled broadly. “Thank you for sharing that with us, Armin.”  Armin smiled back bashfully.

“Now, we can move on to someone else. Levi?”

Levi turned his mask to show the group. It was a blank white face.

“Tell us about your mask, Levi.”

Levi rolled his eyes. “My mask is about man’s inhumanity to man.”

Hanji’s face froze, her smile looking suddenly forced and one eyebrow drawn low in a half-grin, half-scowl. “Oh, really! Would you like to elaborate on your theme?”

“Yes. I hate art therapy.”  He shoved the blank mask under his chair and folded his arms across his chest. I frowned at him. There wasn’t any reason to be so disagreeable to someone who was only trying to help. Wasn’t the whole point of art therapy to try and explore the things that were kind of difficult to even put into words? And he had to go and mock it with his bad attitude?

“I’d like to go next, Hanji.” I surprised myself by speaking up.

“This is the mask I made,” I said, showing it to the group. 

“That’s a really stark contrast, Marco,” Hanji said, her exasperation with Levi evaporating. “What do the two halves mean?”

“I am kind of in two parts. One part of me is the part that I show to everyone and I try to be the best that everyone expects of me, working hard at my studies and applying for colleges. I tried to be a good son, a good friend, a good student. Everything had to be good and perfect, even when I wasn’t. “

“Which half is that?”

“The white half.”

Hanji nodded. “And the black half?”

“The other half is the part that people don’t get to see. I don’t really want to talk about it, because I’d rather that it wasn’t part of me, that I didn’t have to deal with it. I’m ashamed of it. Everyone calls you crazy. I didn’t—don’t want to be crazy. I feel like… my two halves are constantly fighting with each other over which one gets to dominate my life. “

“Does this mask represent a specific time in your life?”

“This mask is before I tried… to kill myself.”

“Is there a reason that you made them white and black?”

“The dark part has my depression in it. It has how much I hate my body in it. My self-harm. How much I don’t want to be here. How trapped I felt. My fear of life, but my fear of death also. The light part has how much I love my parents in it, how much I love running, and reading. I am capable; I can do almost anything I put my mind to. I like to think that I am kind and patient, so that is in there as well. “

Hanji stared at me for a moment and then yelped a laugh. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this already, Marco.”

“Y-yeah.” I chanced a look around the room, feeling a blush in my cheeks. Jean was contemplating his mask. Armin gave me a half-smile. Levi stared coldly at me. 

“Thank you for sharing that with us. Jean?”

Jean bristled next to me, and he finally held his mask out in front of him. It was scribbled-on violently, an explosion of yellow that centered around the slit in the mask’s plastic lips. The jagged lines reached up past the nose, where they met a similar fury of red. The red lines radiated out from the burst of yellow, nettling a field of white. In the center of the forehead, crossing over the white into the red, there was a vertical slit, a black gash, like an axe wound or a third eye.  

“Wow, Jean, that’s a very powerful image.”

“Is it?”

“Yes, of course. The color, the movement. It has a lot of energy.”  Hanji’s voice had dropped down to a lower register. I recognized the voice; it was the kind of soothing voice you used to talk to an upset child to calm them down.

“I guess.”  

“What’s the significance of the color around the mouth?”

“I guess…what I’m trying to show is that my mouth gets me into a lot of trouble. I say things that I don’t mean and I try to start shit even when I’m not interested in fighting. The red here is… because I’m angry a lot and I think red is an angry color.”

“Why do you say things you don’t mean, Jean?”

He rolled his shoulders in a shrug. “I just like seeing the reaction on people’s faces, knowing I can push their buttons. It’s a powerful feeling.”

“You like feeling powerful?”

“Well, like I can control someone, control the way they feel. I like that.”  Jean looked at me briefly, his eyes darting back down to his mask almost as quickly as they’d rested on me. What did that look mean?  Why did he look at me when he was talking about controlling the way someone felt?

I had already gotten fond of Jean, I realized. I liked his presence near me.  It was probably just leftover feelings from his closeness to me after my suicide attempt, or so I was trying to tell myself. He was just friendly with me because he felt responsible for me. There wasn’t anything more than that.

So why was there a sinking feeling in my stomach when he said that he wanted to control how people felt?

 “Maybe I don’t … have control of a lot of things, so being able to make someone feel the way I want them to is a nice feeling. Or a feeling I know how to deal with. I know I can piss people off, so I do. I know where people are when they’re angry.”

“Do you do it to hurt people?” Armin piped up, asking the question that was already forming in my mind.

“No, I guess not. I don’t really want to hurt anyone, but it happens before I’m even aware of it sometimes.”

“What about the black line in the center, there?” Hanji again.

“I…don’t even really know why I drew that.”  Jean frowned at his mask and Hanji took this as an opportunity to press him.

“Is it an opening?“

“Yeah. Yeah, it’s a hole… in me.” Jean’s voice was a little shaky. I knew what it meant to admit that there was a hole in yourself, that there was a place in you that wasn’t complete.

“Is it something you can close? Do you want to close it?” Hanji’s voice had dropped again into that calming register again.

“I don’t know what closing it means. If you have a wound and you close it without cleaning it, it can get infected, right? But if it’s not a wound, if it’s supposed to be there, I don’t want to close it. I want it to stay open.”

Supposed to be there? Was there ever supposed to be a hole in yourself? Was there ever a time when that was okay? Even I had known that something was terribly wrong with me. What happened to him that he thought a hole was supposed to be there?

I looked at him and thought, for the first time since he woke up and clung to me in the aftermath of his nightmare, that he looked vulnerable.  I wanted to soothe him and comfort him. I wanted to be a rock for him, someone he could depend on. I wanted to be the one he told his secrets to, the one he trusted. 

Hanji smiled warmly. “Thank you for sharing with us, Jean.”

“Whatever.”

And like that, the walls were in place again. His eyes were shuttered, his vulnerability hidden behind bravado. But I had seen something of the real Jean, hadn’t I, even for a moment?

I realized, as the rest of the group talked about their masks, that I didn’t really think much about them.  It wasn’t like I didn’t care about other people or their problems. It was just that I was caught up in Jean. There was so much that I didn’t know about him. We had almost never talked in the hospital, and most of what I could remember was half-delirious from pain medication. He’d spent time with my parents, and my parents had gone on about how it was lucky that I had a good friend there with me. Rather than correct them, I’d let it go. They didn’t need to know that I’d stopped having friends months ago.

Jean… was basically the only friend I had now. I’d fucked up his life by stepping into the path of a bus. It was me that had landed him in this psych ward. Did I have any right to demand anything from him, to want anything from him? I didn’t even deserve his friendship, much less anything… more than that.

Even thinking that sentence, completing that thought, was painful.  _Let’s not even think about that, Marco. There’s a long way to go for you in here, in your recovery, in your life. Don’t sabotage it by thinking about banging your probably-straight roommate. Don’t fall in love with a straight guy. You’ll only end up crying._

He looked at me again, still clearly irritated by having to participate in this art therapy session at all. I tried to offer him a smile, but his expression didn’t change. If anything, it seemed to piss him off even more.


	4. Have I Made A Terrible Mistake?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Marco has a breakthrough with his social worker and learns that his parents are coming to visitation tomorrow. Meanwhile, Jean still seems to be in a bad mood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tracked tags: #fic: what it means to feel, #wimtf, #tigerine  
> My tumblr: tigerine.tumblr.com
> 
> Thanks for being so patient while waiting for this chapter! Don't be afraid to come drop an ask on my tumblr~ they really make my day.

I had a session with Mr. Schultz after lunch. He was dressed smartly, an easy smile on his face when the orderly and I entered the room.

“Good… well, I guess it’s afternoon, now.”  He nodded to the orderly, who locked my chair in place.

“Yeah, it is.”

The orderly left, closing the door behind him; the thud of the door meeting the frame seemed heavy and final.

“So how have you been feeling, Marco?”

I looked down at my lap but couldn’t really say anything. I had so many things that I hadn’t yet worked through with Jean from art therapy this morning—

“I see you had art therapy in group this morning. Ms. Hanji shared a picture of your mask with me.”

“Yeah.”

“Tell me about the mask.”

I gave him a truncated version of what I’d said in group, which he nodded and absorbed. When I finished, he folded his hands in his lap and looked at me, his head slightly tilted. At first I thought he looked angry, but I realized that he just had the kind of eyebrows that made him look that way all the time. He just looked concerned.

“That… that’s it.”

“You look like you want to say something else,” he replied quietly, smoothing a hand over his slacks. “So I can wait until you’re comfortable saying it.”

I bristled. He was baiting me, trying to draw more out of me. “You know, not everything has a hidden meaning. Sometimes things just are what I say they are.”

“Maybe not. But I feel like there’s more here that you’re not telling me. Now, I know,” he said, holding up his hand as I opened my mouth angrily, “I don’t blame you for not trusting me. I know it’s hard to trust someone you’ve just met. “His brown eyes were warm and direct, and his voice was gentle, but firm.  “I know that you think I’m just here to fill your time. And to some extent that’s true. But I wouldn’t be in this line of work if I didn’t really want to help you.”

Silence stretched between us, broken only once by the sound of his pen rolling to a stop on his desk as he set it aside. It was a fountain pen, brass-nibbed and wood-barreled with a gold-plated clip. _An important pen for important things._

I’d seen footage of legislation being signed with a dozen nice fountain pens. Love letters written in india ink with a classic nib, or calligraphy for a wedding. This guy… was someone who uses an important pen for important things. Important things like… this session.

My words in group came back to me. _I need to try to get better._ I need to tell someone about how this all _really_ started or it’s going to eat me alive. If I can’t talk about it, I can’t get better. I can’t work on getting better while all of this is still brewing in me. I have to tell someone.

I looked up at Mr. Schultz, who tilted his head again. If I can’t talk to Jean about this—and I didn’t feel that I could— _It might as well be him._

“I… I don’t know who I am.”  The admission came out of my mouth on its own. I lifted a hand and pushed it through my hair.

“How long have you felt like that?”

“Since late in my freshman year.”

I watched his face as he picked up my chart; his lips tightened into a line as he did the mental math. _Nearly four years ago._

“And when did you start feeling like you weren’t in your own body?” His voice was quieter; everyone always talked like that about the dysphoria: cautiously.

I looked down at my right leg, at the way it ended at the edge of the wheelchair. “I… I had a cousin who was deployed. He was wounded and lost his left leg because of a roadside bomb. He got so much attention when he came back.”

“Were you jealous of that attention?”

“Yeah, a little bit.” My voice sounded smaller. I had been jealous, but not of his injuries. Not at first.

“Did your parents stop paying attention to you? Did you feel—“

“No, this is not their fault.”

Mr. Schultz blinked; my voice had been angrier, louder than I’d intended, but… this really _wasn’t_ their fault. When he spoke again, his voice was back to that calm, cautious tone. “I’m not suggesting it’s anyone’s fault, Marco.”

“It’s my fault.” The sting in my nose and the blurred vision, the way the room trembled…I ducked my head down; I was crying again.

“No, it isn’t.” Mr. Schultz leaned forward, uncrossing his legs and resting his forearms on his knees. “This is not about blame. When you’re depressed, it’s easy to lose your sense of self.”

The floodgates were already open; fat tears rolled down my cheeks. I might as well get all this out in the open.  “I wanted to feel valued. I felt like my cousin was valuable. He’d given everything right up to the ultimate price for his country and my family, they… they admired him for that. “My voice broke in a sob, but I rubbed my eyes with the hem of my sleeve and plunged ahead. The words came almost faster than I could even say them. 

“Everyone loved him no matter what. I wanted that. I wanted that _so much_.” I looked up at Mr. Schultz. His face had softened and he watched me with a sympathetic expression. It didn’t make me angry to be looked upon like that: I felt pitied and that only made my heart twist more.

“I came out to my parents shortly before he got discharged, and do you know what they did? Nothing. I didn’t get a reaction at all. I didn’t get any dirty looks or homophobic comments. But I didn’t get anything like ‘we love you no matter what’ either.”

“So you felt like they—“

“—didn’t even see me. Like they didn’t even care. That I was a non-concern. Like I was the thing they didn’t have to worry about, a sure thing, a guaranteed good son and good student. Even though I was already hurting so much.”

“Did you ever talk to them about how you were feeling?”

“No.” I sniffed loudly and took a tissue from the box he offered. “I probably should have.”

I looked down at my leg, at the folded and pinned sleeve of my shirt and a cold horror began to worm into my mind. “Have…have I made a terrible mistake?”

Mr. Schultz’s eyes flicked to the amputation sites and then met mine again. “Can I be a bit personal with you, Marco?”

I nodded, still unable to speak, my tongue stuck to the roof of my mouth.

“If you spend your time thinking about things that you think are mistakes, you’re spending all your mental energy on things that have already happened. We can’t do anything about the past or the choices we’ve already made. If we think that this is sending us down a path we don’t want any more, we change the way we make our decisions.”

“And… and what about the bad decisions we’ve already made?”  My voice shook.

“It is what it is. Nothing we do now can undo them. We must simply learn to live the best life we can, from this point forward.”  He smiled faintly. “If you can get there, you’ll be okay, Marco.”

“ _If_ I can get there?”

Mr. Schultz chuckled and then leaned back in his chair. “ _When_ you get there.”  He looked at his watch. “One more thing, Marco, because we are coming to the end of our session here,” he said quietly. “I have been in contact with your parents about visitation tomorrow.”

Visitation. I hadn’t seen them since I got admitted. My family.  “What about it?”

“They’re going to come tomorrow afternoon. If you’d like, you can call them and talk to them. They can bring you anything you needed from home that you forgot.”

“Yeah,” I replied. “I’d love to talk to them.”

“I’ll let the nurse know.”

“Okay.” I paused for a second. “Thanks.” 

“That’s what I’m here for.”

Hanji placed the call for me; she picked a phone near the edge of the nurse’s station, but that didn’t make it any more comfortable. I tried to ignore the other people that hung around the nurse’s station, but they milled around endlessly. It wasn’t like there was a heck of a lot to do here, so I couldn’t really blame them for trying to hang around the phone and pick up anything interesting.

“Hello? Marco?”

My heart twisted.  Her voice sounded strained. “Hi, Mom.”

“How are you doing, sweetheart?”

I tightened my hand around the receiver and looked up at Hanji. Her attention was elsewhere. “I’m fine, Mom. I…” My voice failed. There wasn’t really any way to talk about this. “There’re a lot of good people here and I think they’re helping me a lot.”

Her sigh of relief was audible, even over the noise of the nurses’ station. “I’m really glad to hear that.”

I flipped the foot rest on my chair up, sliding the grippy sock over the linoleum floor. “My social worker said you guys were coming to visitation tomorrow?”

“Yes,” she said. There was a sound of papers shuffling, and then, “Your dad and I have been gathering information about prosthetics for you. Would you like us to bring what we’ve got so far?”

“Yeah, that’d be great.”

“You’ll still need PT, but you can get back… in the swing of things whenever you want.”

“Y-yeah.”

“Is there anything else I can bring you? I could get some crossword puzzle books or something?”

I tipped my head back, looking up at the fluorescent lighting. “I had a book on my nightstand that I wanted to finish…”

“I saw that, but I don’t think Machiavelli is a good choice for you right now, sweetie.”

No. No, of course not.

“If you wanted, I could bring you something else from your nightstand?” There was a slightly teasing tone to her voice and I reddened when I realized what she was talking about.

“MOM!”  Several heads even beyond the nurses’ station turned and looked my way.

“What? Oh for pity’s sake, Marco, I am not an idiot. I know what teenagers keep in their nightstands.”  Hanji blinked, her face full of concern. ‘Are you okay?’ she mouthed.  I nodded, still wanting to just sink through the floor to the center of the earth.

“So, do you want that?”

“I-I guess. There’s not much else to do here.” _I cannot believe I am agreeing to this._

“Okay, sweetie. I’ll find a few other things to throw in there, too. “

“Just… don’t let Dad see it, okay?”

“He won’t even know I’m—“ There was a loud bang and a sound of commotion and a long string of curses I recognized as coming from my father.

“Mom? MOM?!” Hanji looked at me again and made a gesture of, ‘well??’ I shook my head. What was going on??

“Just a second, Marco,” my mother said, her voice calm. She disappeared for a second, and I heard her going back and forth with my dad. Then she picked up the phone again.

“Sorry, Marco, I have to go, we have to take your father to the clinic.”

“What?? What’s going on, Mom?”

“He shot a staple into his hand while he was working on your ramp. It’s not bad, but it’ll need stitches.” There was a rustling and then a muffled, “Just go get in the car!”

“Mom—“

“I gotta go, I’ll see you tomorrow, love you, bye-bye!”  And the receiver went dead with a click. I looked at it and then handed it back to Hanji.

“Is everything okay, Marco?”  Hanji replaced the handset, looking at me with a worried look.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said, my mind whirling. Dad was building a ramp for me? I mean, there would need to be some kind of accommodation for the chair. Even though Dad had been unusually taciturn in the past weeks, it felt good, somehow, to know that he was doing things for me, even while I was in here.

The rest of the day after my session went by at an agonizing pace.  Jean seemed to be in a foul mood no matter what we tried to do.  Levi was sitting on the couch furthest away from the rest of us. Armin found a ratty deck of playing cards and was setting up a game of solitaire. Jean‘s bad temper persisted through dinner, and he left me out in the common area afterwards, retreating back to our room.

“Sorry, are you okay, Marco? Do you want to stop?”

Armin was looking at me, reflexively tucking one strand of his longish blond hair behind an ear.

“Ah, I’m sorry, Armin. My mind isn’t really on checkers right now.”  I leaned forward and slid one piece diagonally before sitting back again.

“I can kind of tell. I’m trash at checkers and I’m winning.”  And he jumped one of my pieces, collecting it in his hand.

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to apologize so much, you know.” He smiled, that same gentle smile he had for everyone. “Everyone that’s in here is having a rough time.”

“Yeah, I guess so.” I looked down the hall to the door to our room. The door was still closed.

“Do you want to talk about it?”

I looked down at the checkerboard and twisted my lips. “I don’t think so. It’s probably just me overreacting.”

“That’s kind of the story of everyone here,” Armin replied. “Everyone seems to think they’re overreacting to something, like a crappy life is something we should just expect.”  He stacked the captured checker on top of the others he’d claimed. “But sometimes we’re not overreacting. I think we have a right to expect to be happy.”

“I guess that works, as long as you’re being honest about who you are and why you’re here,” I ventured.

“What do you mean?”

I sighed. “If you’re here you need help, right? Things aren’t going right or you need a break, whatever.”

Armin nodded and I continued. “But this only works if your problem is something that’s not going to continue to cause you problems later on. Does it really help at all to be in here if everything that’s terrible is just waiting for you outside? Only now it will be worse because everyone knows you’ve spent time in a mental institution.”

I reached out and moved one of my pieces to try and capture one of Armin’s. “And now that you’ve had your time in a crazy house, everyone knows you can’t hold yourself together so people bug out at the first sign of distress.”

I hadn’t realized I had so much to say on the topic, but it really did upset me. I was still mulling over my own session with Mr. Schultz earlier today, but Jean intruded on my thoughts constantly. It was becoming clearer by the second that something about the art therapy session had gotten to Jean and was eating at him. Was it the fact that he’d been pushed into doing something he didn’t want to do? Was it that he was pushed into talking about himself when he didn’t want to?  The more time I spent around him, the more attracted I was to him. But I was also troubled by knowing next to nothing about him.

 “Why don’t we stop, Marco?”

Armin held out another one of my pieces he’d captured with a sheepish grin.  I couldn’t help smiling in return. “Yeah, I think that might be best.”  We swept the checkers and board into the tattered box; I looked around at the common room, which had gone from half-full to only two or three other people.

“Want a ride back to your room?” Armin offered.

“Only if you’re heading that way,” I replied.

“It’s no trouble,” Armin responded, taking the handles of my chair and flipping the brake off with his foot. 

When Armin opened the door, the room was dark except for a light under the bathroom door; the soft patter of a shower filled the room with white noise. “This okay? Should I turn on a light?” Armin asked and I shook my head.

“Thanks, Armin.”

“You’re welcome. Good night, Marco.”

“Night.”

I pulled myself into bed with a long sigh of relief, welcoming the feel of being stretched out. Sitting on my butt all day hurt; there were only so many ways you could shift your weight before you worked your way around back to the original position. I listened to the sound of the shower, wondering how long Jean had been in there.

I woke to the sound of heavy breathing and the sounds of exertion. I came to slowly, blinking and then frowning at the sour, dry taste in my mouth; I hadn’t brushed my teeth before drifting off. The door to the bathroom was open, the fluorescent light dimly limning a figure on the floor. Jean was shirtless, his palms shoulders-width apart on the linoleum, doing push-ups. I watched his shoulder blades draw together as he neared the floor and the gentle tremble of his biceps as he pushed up.

“Jean?”

He pushed up one last time before standing up and looking at me. Sweat ran down the side of his face. How long had he been doing that? I scooted to the edge of the bed, transferring to my chair.

“Where are you going?” He was out of breath, but he didn’t sound angry. I was relieved. It was bad enough dealing with my own problems without adding Jean’s.

“I fell asleep before I could brush my teeth,” I said, rolling into the bathroom and grabbing my toothbrush.

“Yeah, sorry about that,” Jean said.

He walked into the bathroom behind me and I nearly choked on my toothpaste. The flat planes of his chest cut down into abs and a flat stomach and the line of dark hair that trailed from his belly button down to the waistband of his sweatpants— it was too much. I closed my eyes briefly to try and clear the image from my head. His muscle tone was impressive; I vaguely remembered having tone like that when I was in track, but as the depression had taken hold, I’d lost interest in my body. A few weeks of exercise would probably bring it right back, but Jean’s body was, to use a cliché word, chiseled.

I brushed my teeth as fast as I could, even angrily. I just needed to keep him at arm’s length before this got really complicated. Well, complicated for me. Jean would never know how complicated it was. I felt his hands rest on the handles of my chair; he was ready to roll me back to the side of my bed. His closeness was an irritant. I didn’t want him nursing me, I wanted to—

 _Yeah, let’s just admit it, Marco._ I wanted to sleep with him. But I didn’t want to _just_ sleep with him once and then have it be an awkward footnote in his recovery, or in mine. I wanted him to want me back, a lot more than once.

_I think I’ve fallen for him._

“What are you doing up?” I resolved to just get back in bed as fast I could and escape back to the depths of sleep.

“Couldn’t sleep.”

I got under the covers as fast as I could, shoving my foot down into the blankets.  I looked up at Jean. He had rolled my chair back out of the way and was standing in the middle of the walkway with an odd expression on his face.

“Don’t let me stop you, Jean.” I lay on my side, my knees pulled up and packed my head into my pillow. “You won’t keep me up.”

He grunted, his shoulders rolling in a shrug, and he got back down on his hands. His back dipped in a few push-ups before he paused and shifted his hands inward, until his forefingers and thumbs made a diamond.  His pace slowed, and he clearly struggled with it, but he kept going. His ragged breathing sounded close, almost as if it was in my ear, and it sang me to sleep.


End file.
